microsoft surface book 2 15-inch

Is the most powerful laptop-tablet hybrid in the world worth it?

The 15-inch version of Microsoft’s brilliant laptop is the most powerful, and pricey, 2-in-1 in the world

From £2,349 microsoft.com

We loved the 13.5-inch version of the Surface Book 2 (reviewed back in issue 278) and now the 15-inch version is here, rocking – naturally – a bigger screen and even more performance. So much so, that in its field it’s unmatched by anything out there. But at £2,349, it’s also a serious wedge of money, commanding an additional £850 over the 13.5-inch model. Is the bigger, beefier model worth your cash?

Bigger, but not quite…

The Surface Book 2 looks exactly like the 13.5-inch model, but the 15-inch form factor means more width and length, though thickness is the same at just 15-23mm. It’s also an extra 370g. Physically, they’re not that different, despite the extra screen space. A bump in resolution to 3240x2160 makes up for the extra 1.5-inches of screen, and it looks tremendously crisp and vivid. Frustratingly, there’s still no bundled Surface Pen (an extra £100) for drawing directly on the screen, which can be popped out to use as a standalone tablet.

The Surface Book 2 15-inch carries a 6GB GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card - a serious gaming GPU which offers loads of graphics performance. It’s even VR-capable. Elsewhere, there’s an 8th gen quad-core Intel Core i7 processor. This leads to blisteringly fast allround performance on the Surface Book 2 and, in partnership with its 16GB of RAM, means solid photo and video editing capabilities. You get a fairly light 256GB of flash storage. An optional 1TB SSD gives you loads of space, but it brings the cost up to a princely £3,149.

In terms of raw processor performance, it benchmarks a tiny bit lower than the identically priced 15-inch MacBook Pro, but is close enough to make no odds. The Nvidia 1060, however, absolutely crushes the measly AMD Radeon chips in Apple’s machines. We threw a brace of modern titles at it - Wolfenstein 2 and Rise Of TheTomb Raider – and it handled them at max settings with ease. Impressively, despite all this power, the Surface Book 2 lasted for more than seven hours in our battery test, though the harder you push it, the lower that figure will be.